Earlier today, the President of the Southern Baptist Convention, JD Greear, used his annual address to promote social justice, signal his virtue, call for affirmative action in denominational hiring, and support Black Lives Matter.
Greear gave his annual address virtually because the Southern Baptist Convention’s annual meeting was canceled due to the Cornavirus Panic of 2020. In fact, Greear’s own congregation, Summit Church in North Carolina, will be closed until at least the end of June. This hasn’t stopped Greear from encouraging his church to take part in other mass gatherings, chiefly large-scale protests against the police. For Greear, corporate worship of Jesus is unsafe and irresponsible, but virtue-signaling never takes a holiday.
In the screenshot below, Greear encourages Summit Church members – who aren’t allowed to attend church on Sunday for “safety” reasons – to march against “social injustice.” The tweet has a photo of a black man growling angrily in a hoodie. And Greear was not encouraging an online protest, but a physical march that was to take place in city of Durham.
For Greear, Jesus takes second-place to social justice.
Using his Twitter feed to promote “social justice” is one thing, but using his position as Southern Baptist president to promote unabashed wokeness is something else altogether.
Nonetheless, that’s what JD Greear did.
Beginning at the 9-minute-mark of the video below and after recalling the racist past of the SBC (the denomination was founded in disagreement about whether or not slave-holders could serve as missionaries), Greear applauds the SBC for its racial diversity but laments (10.23 mark) that, “Sadly, our leadership does not yet reflect the diversity that God has given to our membership.”
Watch below:
Greear then goes on to say…
Southern Baptists, we need to say it clearly as a Gospel issue, “Black Lives Matter.”
Greear then goes on to rebuke Southern Baptist who say, “All lives matter,” insinuating that it’s racially motivated.
Greear also says “Let’s not talk about stats right now.” By that, Greear means that Christians should not demonstrate through empirical data that black people are not at greater statistical risk to be killed by the police than white people, or that black police officers are more likely to kill black individuals than white police officers.
Like others who have embraced the Religion of Wokeness, statistical data and factual evidence doesn’t matter to Greear because his commitment to the social justice narrative is religious in nature; faith doesn’t require evidence.
Instead, Greear says to listen to the anecdotal stories of black friends and disregard any empirical data that may contradict them (this is called “story-telling” and is an essential doctrine of Critical Race Theory).
Greear’s claim that “Black Lives Matter” is a “gospel issue” is nothing new for Greear and his ‘woke’ evangelical peers. To Popularity Gospel proponents, everything is a “gospel issue.” The Gospel Coalition claimed food allergies were a gospel issue. They claimed chain-migration was a gospel issue. We’ve been covering the phenomenon of calling every ‘woke’ talking point a gospel issue since at least 2017 when JD did his podcast episode, Not Everything is a Gospel Issue.
After saying the repeated phrase, “Black Lives Matter” and ordering Baptists not to claim all lives matter, Greear does the Goose-Step Two-Step by claiming…
“And by the way, I realize the movement and the website have been hijacked by some political operatives whose worldview and policy prescriptions would be deeply at odds from my own…I do not align myself with the Black Lives Matter organization.”
Why does Greear use the motto, slogan, phrase, and copyrighted and trademarked name of Black Lives matter if he doesn’t support the organization?
Greear could say:
- Black lives are sacred
- Black lives are important
- Black lives are essential
Of course, Greear is using the expression in complete disregard for its propagandic purposes, serving as a Useful Idiot for an anti-Christian, pro-gay, Marxist organization that started using that expression with a hashtag. An organization did not “hijack” that phrase, it coined it.
Meanwhile, Greear is promoting Black Lives Matter’s propaganda suggesting that appeals to evidence, facts, and statistics in regard to current events are racist and insensitive.
JD Greear is either a profoundly evil man for speaking out both sides of his mouth or a profoundly stupid man (and most megachurch pastors aren’t stupid).
